Rand Paul Drinks Tea, Turns Into Hawk?

“When it is said that
nothing,
including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who
say it not also threatening genocide?”
– Rep. Ron Paul, May 22, 2007

“I don’t think you take [nuclear weapons] off the table.”
– Rand
Paul on Iran, The O’Reilly Factor, May
19, 2010

“Rand Paul believes in a strong
national defense, opposes closing Guantanamo Bay, and believes that Iran
is a serious threat….”
– Text of Rand
Paul campaign ad, March 2010
(removed from YouTube “by the user” in the last 72 hours)

In
September 2008, an estimated 10,000 liberty-minded individuals crowded
into the Target Center in Minneapolis, just a few miles away from the
Republican National Convention.

They had staged a sort of alternative
convention, a “Rally for the Republic,” hailing presidential candidate
Ron Paul, the longtime Republican congressman from Texas, who had been
excoriated by his party so badly that they had refused to let him
onto the floor of the convention hall without an escort and
had prevented
many of his delegates from announcing their votes out loud during the
Sept. 3 roll call nomination.

Paul supporters, who had swelled in
numbers
and had once raised $6 million in small donations for him in one day, were dismissed as nut-jobs and “Paultards” by mainstream Republicans. His views
– especially against the ongoing military operations abroad – were
sneered at and dismissed as too fringe for the RNC platform. Meanwhile, “momma
grizzly” Sarah Palin was
crowned queen of the ball, sashaying through a
convention speech with a lust for the Global War on Terror matched that
night only by Rudy
“9/11” Giuliani himself.

How things have changed – sort of.
Today, Paul’s son Rand is one step closer to becoming a U.S. senator,
giving him a platform exceeding that of his libertarian father’s on
Capitol Hill. This development should be a major boon for antiwar
activists
and civil libertarians who have long relied on the elder Paul and his
“revolution” as a reasonable voice for non-intervention. It is especially poignant as the military
will have no less than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan by the 2010
election,
and growing
signs indicate that there
may be more than 50,000 soldiers in Iraq beyond the imposed withdrawal
deadline of August.

Congress – which has ignored the issue
of war for months – will no doubt soon be called on to act, if not
directly on policy, on the budget (which has already exceeded
$1.3 trillion since 2001).

But after months of a grueling primary,
it is not yet clear where the younger Paul’s savvy campaigning ends
and his true ideological impulses begin, particularly on national
security and foreign policy. No one is entirely sure how to reconcile
his more
blistering critiques of the war during his father’s campaign with his more hawkish
pronouncements
– particularly on Iran as “a
dangerous threat to the Middle East”
and against closing the Guantanamo Bay prison – during his own
campaign.

“All and all I think it is a positive
improvement to keep electing more and more pro-liberty candidates, but
those who trumpet Rand as a real liberty candidate might be
disappointed
when he actually gets in office,” offers Tarrin Lupo, who publishes
the LCL Report Web site. He joins other libertarians in their skepticism
of Paul’s embrace of the Tea Party movement, including his courting
of Sarah Palin’s endorsement several months ago.

“At a time when libertarian ideas are
becoming discussed more in the mainstream, the last thing we need is
to become identified with another right-wing conservative with stances
so anti-freedom,” shares writer Christine
Smith, who ran unsuccessfully
for the Libertarian Party nomination for president in 2008.

But Paul’s identification with
the Tea Party movement is unabashed
and certainly justified, at least politically. First, the Ron Paul
Revolution, AKA the liberty movement, AKA Campaign
for Liberty, was identifying
itself with the Boston Tea Party years before it came a haven for
disaffected
Republicans in the wake the Democratic takeover of Washington. In a
way, the Paul libertarians see these neo-patriots as finally coming
over to their way of thinking, not the other way around.

But more importantly, Paul knew he needed
the extraordinary momentum and muscle (not to mention contributions)
of the Tea Party to win the closed Kentucky Republican primary (only
those registered as Republicans as of Jan. 1 were able to vote in the May 18
contest). He guessed early on that some 75 percent of the current Tea
Party movement did not support his father during the 2008 Republican
primary. So he’s careful to call himself not a libertarian, but a
“constitutional conservative.” His frank acknowledgment that his
campaign courted – and
happily received – Sarah
Palin’s endorsement like a blessing from on high indicates how
important
it is he identify with her faction, despite their differences on war
and civil liberties.

This was especially true given that he was running against
the establishment Republican, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson,
who had the approbation of not only Kentucky’s senior Sen. Mitch
McConnell,
but also heavyweights like Dick
Cheney and plainly nervous
national neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, all poised to condemn Rand
for his “neo-isolationist” pedigree. Indeed, Grayson and his surrogates
went on the attack early last fall, leading to some surprisingly hawkish
responses from Paul.

“Foreign terrorists do not deserve
the protections of our Constitution,” Paul said in a Nov. 19 release. “These thugs should stand before military
tribunals and be kept off American soil. I will always fight to keep
Kentucky safe, and that starts with cracking down on our enemies.”

It cannot be stressed enough how far
this rhetoric diverges from the liberty movement’s sustained view
of the Global War on Terror. Just the mention of “foreign terrorists” – when Paul should know by now that the majority of prisoners
at Gitmo today have not been
charged with any crime, much less
convicted – smacks of gratuitous right-wing demagoguery. Not to mention
that the tribunals have been criticized by a growing line of respected
military lawyers – not just
“kooky” libertarians and the
ACLU – on ethical, moral, and constitutional grounds. And the Supreme
Court ruled two years ago that “foreign terrorists” being held on
American soil do have some rights – including
habeas corpus,
the right to question their detention in court.

Not surprisingly, Paul’s comments and
the tone of his muscular campaign ads are right in line with the Tea
Party, and nowhere was this more evident than at the big Tea Party
confabs earlier this year, including the National Tea Party Convention
in Tennessee, where Palin brought
down the roof
when she said
terrorists don’t deserve constitutional rights and mocked President
Obama: “We need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing
at the lectern.”

In fact, if the Campaign for Liberty
hadn’t bussed in all those college libertarians into the Tea
Party-friendly
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, Ron Paul might have lost the straw
poll, and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten the applause he did when
he said during
his own address
that fighting wars “so carelessly” and telling the rest of the world
what to do are “neoconservatism, but not true conservatism.” The only
“national security” this
crowd wanted to talk about
otherwise was the stuff Liz Cheney was
dishing out: thanking the
CIA for waterboarding, criticizing Obama for not waterboarding enough,
and insisting the administration wants to “bring terrorists into the
United States.”

Referring to the response of regular
CPAC-goers to her group’s antiwar stance at the three-day event,
Tracey Harmon of the libertarian Ladies
of Liberty Alliance (LOLA),
said, “I’ve been called unpatriotic.” It makes sense that
Rand Paul would want to avoid a similar response in Kentucky, whose
Republicans hail from a Jacksonian conservative, proud
military
tradition.

But Paul’s refusal to outright repudiate
or neutralize the overheated rhetoric, while indulging in it himself
when it comes to right-wing hobgoblins like Iran and Guantanamo Bay,
has set off some alarms. More recently, he publicly chose
sides with Israel on the
politically explosive issue of Middle
East peace. This seems so oddly forced and out of place that it might
only be explained as more pandering to the right wing:

“I would never vote to place trade
restrictions on Israel, and I would filibuster any attempts to place
sanctions on Israel or tariffs on any Israeli goods.

“The issue of Palestine is incredibly
difficult and complex. The entire world wishes for peace in the region,
but any arrangement or treaty must come from Israel, when she is ready
and when her conditions have been met.

“I strongly object to the arrogant
approach of Obama administration, itself a continuation of the failures
of past U.S. administrations, as they push Israel to make security
concessions
behind thinly veiled threats.

“Only Israel can decide what is in
her security interest, not America and certainly not the United
Nations.
Friends do not coerce friends to trade land for peace, or to give up
the vital security interests of their people.”

It all sounds too much like the last
administration for some of his early supporters to bear. Here’s a
comment from cfountain72 on a Rand Paul-related post I put up on the Antiwar.com
blog May 19:

“As someone who did make some small
contributions to Rand’s campaign, I am torn as to what the man really
stands for. Is he indeed a non-interventionist like his father, and
making some calculated moves to focus attention on areas of agreement
to garner broader Tea Party support? Or perhaps ‘being his own man’
means (unlike his father) that he regards American intervention a
necessity
after all? While, in any case, I think he’ll be a better Senator than
his November opponent, I certainly wouldn’t continue to send donations
to out-of-state candidates that hew to the neo-clown mold.
I pray Rand deosn’t (sic) fall into that trap.”

In his favor, Paul has
said repeatedly that he would
cut away at the bloated military-
industrial complex, including the federal procurement system, which
fosters an insider racket in which behemoths like Halliburton send
battalions
of lobbyists and consultants to Capitol Hill each year to mold and drive
defense policy and budgets. The companies are then rewarded billions
in defense contracts each year, despite, as in the case of Halliburton,
numerous accusations of waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer funds.

Like his father, Rand doesn’t believe “we have to have troops
in 130 countries and 750 bases.”
He says there should have been a “declaration of war” for the operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq. While he
says
he would not have voted in favor of such a declaration for Iraq, he
would have for Afghanistan, because “I felt that we were attacked, and
we were attacked by people [on 9/11] who were organizing and plotting
against us in Afghanistan.”

But Rand doesn’t talk much about the
current counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan, other than to say he “has
questions” and there must be a “debate”
on the course of our national security interests in Afghanistan moving
forward.

Daniel McCarthy, a Campaign for Liberty
scribe and senior editor at The
American Conservative,
hardly a nest of hawks, nonetheless cautions against a libertarian
backlash
against Rand solely on the basis of his primary campaign rhetoric:

“Rand is able
communicate with the quite large segment of the GOP that is not
anti-interventionist, but that is anti-nation-building – the segment of the GOP
that could have become dominant in the 1990s but that went dormant after
9/11. I think Rand himself is halfway between his father’s views
and those of the semi-non-interventionist Right of the 1990s. … It’s
hard to say how he will vote as a senator if he wins in November – but the fact
that he has made any criticisms at all of America’s ongoing wars and has said he
would not have voted for the Iraq War already distinguishes him from all the
other GOP senators.

“I think the odds
are that he’ll be better than his colleagues: if he wanted to be perfectly safe
and unobjectionable to GOP voters, he would never have said anything critical
about U.S. foreign policy. No group of voters ever gets 100
percent of what it wants from any political candidate. The
question is, if you can get 80 or 90 percent, should you try to achieve
that? If not, you aren’t in politics.

“For my part,
speaking personally and not for TAC or anyone else, I’m willing to give Rand
Paul a chance. He won’t vote the way I want on every issue, but
he’ll counter-balance some of the more ideologically imperialist forces in
Washington. There’s a pressing need for that.”

Interestingly, the biggest howl to come
out about Rand Paul’s national security positions in the wake of his
stunning 25-point
win last Tuesday – aside
from spirited discussions on libertarian Facebook pages and assorted blogs – were from neoconservatives who still view Paul
as a threat, despite his steroidal pro-military campaign ads and his
special new friends like Palin (whose own foreign policy gurus include
the likes of Bill Kristol and Randy
Scheunemann).

“Rand Paul’s victory in the Kentucky
Republican primary is obviously a depressing event for those who support
strong national defense and rational conservative politics. In another
year, such a victory would be a prelude to a Republican defeat in the
general election,” wrote conservative pundit David Frum last
week.

Through gritted teeth, Kristol said the
GOP was a “big tent” that could allow an energizing candidate like
Rand Paul into it – but not before he took a few swipes, including
one at papa Paul.

“Paul ran a good campaign,”
Kristol told David Weigel at the
Washington Post.
“He did a good job of being less like his dad – seeming less ‘out
there’ – so if you were a normal Kentucky voter you thought you were
voting for a Sarah Palin-like, anti-Washington figure, not someone who
bought into the whole Ron Paul agenda.”

Comments like this could easily be
dismissed
as the bitter last throes of the Borg-like neoconservative takeover
of the Republican Party post-9/11. Kristol and his pals did their best
to thwart both Ron and Rand Paul, so far to no avail. But the fact that
Rand Paul has identified so sharply with the Tea Party movement, stating
unequivocally that he shares a “kinship” with Sarah Palin and that she is qualified
to be commander in chief, naturally raises questions
for those so dedicated to changing the course of our current foreign
policy.

Everyone is talking today about Paul’s
position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I argue that the ongoing
military
operations of 2001 and 2003 are much more critical to the present and
future health of this country. We’re not only talking budgets here
– billions a year on defense, homeland security, and related federal
expenses – but also the wars’ larger impact on the economy, our
relationship to the world, the creeping government overreach on the
homefront, the tens of thousands of veterans coming home injured and
ill and requiring lifetime care and benefits, the burden
on our communities and families, and the vulnerability we have
felt since 9/11 that never seems to go away.

Questioning where Rand Paul stands on
all this is not suggesting we throw out the “constitutional
conservative”
with the bathwater. While writer Daniel
Larison insists that Paul
“is a refreshing exception to the conventional Republican attitudes
on national security and war that predominate in the Tea Party,” others
would argue that his full embrace of the Tea Party (as evidenced in
his victory
speech) has effectively
muddied
the waters. Will his non-interventionist impulses prevail, or will the
Tea Party demand certain reciprocities for its help in winning the seat?
In a body of 100 polarized members, will he ever be allowed to forge
alliances with senators like Democrat Russ Feingold when it comes to
defending liberty against warrantless wiretapping and more aggressive
military action abroad – or will he be expected to lock arms with
Republican
hawks and anointed Tea Party leaders when such critical votes arise?

Kentuckians deserve to know, as do all
of Rand’s outside donors, who contributed 77 percent of his campaign treasury.
If the waters are muddy, it is his responsibility
to clear them up before November.